YES. As an architect currently renovating a nightmare of a 100-year old building, I completely agree with you here. I feel like the article is missing a little

YES. As an architect currently renovating a nightmare of a 100-year old building, I completely agree with you here. I feel like the article is missing a little bit the perspective of people making buildings. The older and more broken a building gets, more often than not it's easier and quicker to rip everything out and build anew than to fix a problem. Contractors hate fixing other peoples' work and would rather rebuild pipe, conduit, masonry, etc, rather than fix it. I can imagine that with Neolithic building technology, buildings had a limited lifecycle - cracking, mold/rot, etc, and eventually got to a point where each building would have to be demolished. Burning would probably make demolishing earlier - be the quickest way to turn everything into easily moveable ash and rubble so the lot could be cleared for building again. See also: stubble burning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubble_burning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubble_burning)